Saturday, December 17, 2011

Last month I finally got my hands on an Orbitrap Velos plus ETD. Faster, more sensitive, and more robust than my old reliable Orbitrap XL. And now this happens!

The video above is an animation of the new Orbitrap Elite
The Elite has 2.5 times the maximum resolution of my Velos and operates nearly 4 times faster. It also has a slew of other goodies that make it better than the Velos. No idea what the price is, but I'm guessing a cool million. Since I changed jobs I missed ASMS where it was unveiled.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Proteome Discoverer 1.2 is a great piece of software. Now that I've got the module thing down, I don't know how I got anything done with Bioworks. We did, of course, process hundreds of GB of data with Bioworks, but it is so much faster and easier now with Discoverer.
There is, however, one thing that Bioworks does better, much better, than Discoverer.
If you are trying to put together a presentation to show off your SILAC quantification data, would you rather show this:

or

The top is the graphical output for a protein that is ~10 fold down-regulated in the heavy labeled cell line that you would get with Bioworks.
The bottom is an example of the output you get with Discoverer. Not nearly as pretty, or as sciencey!

Summary: Bioworks still has value. Keep an old Windows XP computer around so that you can still run it if you need to!

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Just sent of my new book proposal off to Springer: Quality Control in Biological Mass Spectrometry. I don't know how long these things take to be reviewed, but I'm assuming it can take a long time. I still feel that this is an area that doesn't get nearly enough attention and needs to be addressed.